Self-Made Women Billionaires and Entrepreneurs Globally

From our previous article that focused on the three women billionaires and self-made entrepreneurs from India, we now look at the global front on the leading women featured by Hurun. Hurun is known to deliver to the world a list of self-made billionaires each year and this year; they have released a list of 124 women billionaires and entrepreneurs around the globe. This 124-name list contains almost two-thirds of the world’s self-made women billionaires from China (78 in number) and 3 from India.
The top three women on the self-made women billionaires and entrepreneurs list are from China,

Wu Yajun, who is the co-founder of Longfor, a Beijing-based property developer with a known net worth of close to $17 billion.
Fan Hongwei, the Chairman and President of Hengli Petrochemical Co Ltd, has a net worth of close to $13 billion.
Wang Laichun of Luxshare Precision Industry with a net worth close to $10 billion.

Here are a few unique women who have made their journey into the world of start-ups, established businesses and brands to crave their path and become an inspiration globally for millions of women:

Whitney Wolfe Herd

Known to be the founder and leading lady of the world known and popular dating application named, Bumble, Whitney is an American entrepreneur. Founder and CEO of Bumble, an online dating platform started in 2014; she was also the vice president of marketing at Tinder.

Her entrepreneurship journey started early in college when she started a business selling bamboo tote bags to benefit areas affected by the BP oil spill. She co-founded ‘The help Us Project’. Her second business was Tender Heart’, a clothing line to raise awareness around human trafficking and fair trade. In 2014, Herd founded Bumble – a female-focused dating application, and by 2015 the application reached over 15 million conversations and 80 million matches.

She was featured in Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women under 30 in Tech in 2014 and Forbes’s 30 under 30 in 2017 and 2018. By 2020 Bumble had over 100 million users worldwide, and the brand topped $13 billion in valuation after listing shares on the Nasdaq exchange.

She is known to be the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire after taking Bumble public.

Melanie Perkins

Co-founder and CEO of Canva, Perkins is one of the youngest female CEO’s of a tech start-up valued at over $1 billion. She is known to be one of Australia’s wealthiest women.

Perkins has been the name behind raising a disruptive online design and publishing tool, Canva. It has been overgrowing since its first launch in 2013 and is helping and empowering millions of people across the globe to build, create, design and reach their goals without hindrance. From making an impactful resume to creating simple marketing creatives – Canva has it all to help you take your career off the ground.

Before Canva, Perkins founded her first company, Fusion Books, an online design system for schools to create yearbooks. They are now the largest yearbook publishers in Australia and have recently expanded to France and New Zealand. With her graphic design brand, Canva, reaching a $40 billion valuation in the last quarter of 2021, the entrepreneur became one of the world’s wealthiest women.

Sherly Sandberg

The Chief Operating Officer at Meta Platforms and founder of LeanIn.org, Sandberg is an American business executive and a known philanthropist, apart from being a billionaire.
In 2012, she became the first woman to serve on the board of Facebook, now known as Meta.

Before working with Facebook, she was the vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and an economist with the World Bank. She is known to have received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Since her present position at Meta, she is known to have dramatically increased the social media firm’s revenue. She is the face behind Facebook, positioned as a platform for small businesses to advertise – a tactic that helped the brand to increase ad revenue by 21% during 2020 to close to $84.2 billion.

She is the author of the bestseller Lean In Women, Work and the Will to Lead and Lean In for Graduates and also the co-author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. She also serves on the boards of Women for Women International, ONE and Momentive, along with running a nonprofit organization.

Meg Whitman

Whitman is most popularly known for taking eBay from $5.7 million to $ 8 billion in sales as its CEO from 1998-2008. She is an American business executive and a former political candidate.

In her career journey, Whitman has served as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 2011-2015 and presently sits on board for Procter & Gamble and Dropbox. Her career also involved working with The Walt Disney Company, where she was the vice president for Strategic Planning through the 1980s.

In her career journey spread across a decade with eBay, she oversaw the brand’s expansion from 30 to more than 15,000 employees and from $4 million in annual revenue to $8 billion in annual revenue.

She was named 20th in Forbes list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World.

In 2018 she is known to have invested in an LA-based esports company, Immortals LLC and is a board member.

A few other known and celebrated names included in the list for the first time were that of reality TV personality and socialite Kim Kardashian, with an estimated net worth of US$ 2 billion credited to her beauty brand KKW Beauty. Another includes the famous pop singer Rihanna, joining the list with her label Fenty Beauty for the first time with a net worth close to US$ 1 billion.

Also Read: How India Inspires Global Luxury Brands Like Gucci &LV

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